Grain and Chaff from an English Manor eBook

“Well, well, that
little hairy bull, he shanna be so bad:
But what be yonder beast
I hear, a-bellowing like mad,
A-snorting fire and
smoke out? be it some big Roosian gun!
Or be it twenty bullocks
squez together into one?”

“My steam factotum,
that, Sir, doing all I have to do,
My ploughman and my
reaper, and my jolly thrasher, too!
Steam’s yet but
in its infancy, no mortal man alive
Can tell to what perfection
modern farming will arrive.”

“Steam as yet
is but an infant”—­he had scarcely
said the word,
When through the tottering
farmstead was a loud explosion heard;
The engine dealing death
around, destruction and dismay;
Though steam be but
an infant this indeed was no child’s play.

The women screamed like
blazes, as the blazing hayrick burned,
The sucking pigs were
in a crack, all into crackling turned;
Grilled chickens clog
the hencoop, roasted ducklings choke the
gutter,
And turkeys round the
poultry yard on devilled pinions flutter.

Two feet deep in buttermilk
the stoker’s two feet lie,
The cook before she
bakes it finds a finger in the pie;
The labourers for their
lost legs are looking round the farm,
They couldn’t
lend a hand because they had not got an arm.

Oldstyle all soot, from
head to foot, looked like a big black
sheep,
Newstyle was thrown
upon his own experimental heap;
“That weather-glass,”
said Oldstyle, “canna be in proper fettle,
Or it might as well
a tow’d us there was thunder in the kettle.”

“Steam is so expansive.”
“Aye,” said Oldstyle, “so I see.
So expensive, as you
call it, that it winna do for me;
According to my notion,
that’s a beast that canna pay,
Who champs up for his
morning feed a hundred ton of hay.”

Then to himself, said
Oldstyle, as he homewards quickly went,
“I’ll tak’
no farm where doctors’ bills be heavier than
the rent;
I’ve never in
hot water been, steam shanna speed my plough,
I’d liefer thrash
my corn out by the sweat of my own brow.

“I neither want
to scald my pigs, nor toast my cheese, not I,
Afore the butcher sticks
’em or the factor comes to buy;
They shanna catch me
here again to risk my limbs and loife;
I’ve nought at
whoam to blow me up except it be my woif.”

CHAPTER XVIII.

HOPS—­INSECT ATTACKS—­HOP FAIRS.

“Oft expectation fails,
and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.”

—­All’s
Well that Ends Well.

In a very rare black-letter book on hop culture, A
Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden, published
in the year 1578 and therefore over 340 years old,
the author, Reynolde Scot, has the following quaint
remarks on one of the disorders to which the hop plant
is liable: